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Wednesday, May 20, 2009

How To Get Free Traffic

Once you have your affiliate products all lined up and your website set up all shiny and ready for business - What now? How do you make money? You need customers and to get customers you need website traffic. It`s the same as if you opened a store. You need to let people know that you are open for business, so that they can come and shop at your store.

Website marketing is no different. You need to do some website promotion. Let people know where you are and that you are ready for business.

Some people think they have to use Google adwords or other sources of paid search advertising and pay for people to click on their ad. But this can get pretty expensive and you need to know what you are doing. That's why many people look for ways to get free website traffic.

So, how do you do this if you are strapped for money?

The way many successful web promoters do is by posting articles on free article directory sites. These are short articles 250-400 words long on the subject to which your website is targeted.

For instance let`s take dogs. Say your website is about dogs. If you set up your website that way you should know something about dogs. So you write a short article about breeds of dogs. Another about dog training. Another about care and feeding of a certain breed of dogs. The number of articles you can write is limitless. You will probably need to do a little research, but the rewards will be huge.

At the end of your article you have a resource box. This is where you can use a link to bring readers to your site. This link can direct people to a signup page, where you offer a freebie such as a report, ecourse or any number of things. Your aim here is to obtain their email for future mailing of information or offers.

Another good use of your link in the resource box is to direct your reader to a specific page on your website. This page will contain a sales letter promoting either your own product or an affiliate program. In either case, on this page you are going for the sale more than building your list through a signup box. Of course you can always combine the two on the same page, but I personally have not found this to be very effective.

You can post on forums and blogs related to their theme and do not blatantly advertise your site in your comments there. What you want to do on forums and blogs is use a link to your website in your signature - commonly called your sig file information.

These are just a few effective ways to get free website advertising. Other ways to get free traffic include using search engine optimization within your website, or referred to also as, on-site SEO. You use highly relevant keywords within your website's content to get the search engine spiders to find your site and give it a higher ranking.

All these are ways to get free traffic to your site. The thing to remember is that traffic is the life blood of marketing. Without it your website and offers will just wither up and die.

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

SEO Top Strategies and Intelligence...


Why More Traffic Just Isn't Good Enough Anymore - How to merge SEO with conversion to build business

Is the point of SEO to get as much traffic as possible to a website? Many SEO companies will lead you to believe that more traffic is all there is to it. Let me suggest that the focus of SEO should be audience engagement, rather than traffic.

Setting Up A Membership Site: Vital Factors To Consider

There are many things to consider when setting up a membership site. Having a clearly defined plan on setting it up, and running it, will make your life easier in the long run.

Make MORE From Your Google AdSense!

Use YieldBuild's ad format optimizer to algorithmically determine the ad unit sizes, shapes, colors and formats that make the most money from your AdSense (and other networks, including Chitika, BlueLithium and Tribal Fusion). Used successfully on hundreds of sites—revenue lifts of up to 200%. Start earning MORE from your AdSense Today!

Ins and Outs of Local Search

As the population with internet access explodes, and more and more people are using search engines to find what they need, the usage of local search also continues to rise. For any sites servicing a local or specific geographic audience, submission to local search based engines is becoming more and more important.

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5 Things To Hate About Web Design (and how to fix them) Part 1 of 2

Whether you have limited web design experience or have been designing websites for years, this list probably includes at least one mistake that you or someone you know has been making (or are about to make) during the web design process.

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Succeed With These Webmaster Resources...

Make your Google AdSense Monthly Check Bigger!

You'll wish you had heard of this sooner. Use YieldBuild's ad format optimizer to figure out the ad unit sizes, shapes, colors and formats that make the most money from your AdSense. Used successfully on hundreds of sites;revenue lifts of up to 200%. Start Today!

Shout Your News to the World!

Grab free PR Web account and expose your website to thousands of bloggers and journalists. Plus get listed in Yahoo News and Topix.

Get Your Website Listed in 20 Search Engines - FREE!

Give your website a traffic boost with exposure on 20 search engines. Register your website for inclusion with this free submission service. Don't wait -
Get listed today!

Questions, Answers and Discussions From Our Members...

SR Webinars- Would you like some?

Whether you just read the newsletter or you're an active participant at Site-Reference, we need your input: would you like us to start putting on Webinars? These would range in topic and be designed to assist our members with through 'live' and interactive training sessions. If this appeals to you, have you say here as we'll only get them going if enough of you put requests in.

Checking All Your Pages

When you're implementing something like an analytics program it is crucial you place the code on every single page of your website or you'll get skewed results. How can you make sure you haven't missed any pages?

Question Marks and Query Strings

I've never had a problem with "dynamic" URLs, but I'm trying to convince a client that they're okay - and I'm not having much luck. Most stuff I read says not to use them, and although I could re-write using htaccess or similar, is there anything wrong (from an SEO point of view) with the following format...

Using Compete to Monitor Competitor's Keywords That Drive Traffic

How reliable are sites like Compete and Quantcast. We're looking to find which traffic producing keywords our competitors are using. Should these sites be relied on?

Site Tanking

One of our members asks if we can help him: " I have a website that's been ranking really well for a relatively long time. Initially we had some issues with the site ranking, but we sorted things out. About 2 months ago, my site dropped from 10 000 hits a day to 2000 and I haven't got the foggiest idea of why."

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Credit Card Comparison

Credit Card Comparison

Different credit cards companies provides different types of credit cards with different rates, offers, and etc, that’s reason why we need to compare credit cards that suit our needs and requirements.

You know, credit cards can be a very useful means of payment. Thanks to the plastic money, you don’t have to bring cash anywhere you go. However, it is like a two sided knife. If you can manage it, it will ruin your life. It happens to me once. I was spending a lot and without I realizing it, I was charged with a very high interest. At first, the credit card issuer gave me these lots of benefits. But, it turned out that it gave high interest rate also. Thanks to a website, I was able to find credit card with lower rates. If you want to know about it, read on.

The very important things about the credit card is low interest credit card. You can find it as low as 8.74%. Also you can find credit cards that will give you instant approval, lots of rewards, and also give you cash back. All in one place at comparecards.com

There are lots of other things that you can find out about credit card here. If you want to transfer your balance or find a better credit card, I suggest you to visit this website. You can use the menu links there to get you the best rates there is. Yu can also find credit card issued by bid credit card companies such as Amex, CITI, Capital One credit card and others.

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Become Rich with Adsense : Google Adsense Profits Mixed In With Affiliate Marketing

Are you a webmaster who needs funds to keep your website running? Or is your website the only way for you to earn income? Whichever you are, for as long as you are a webmaster or a web publisher and you need cash, affiliate marketing may work well for you. With affiliate marketing, you may get a lot of cash pouring into your bank account easily. And if your website is rich in great contents and you want to earn more profit, why not get into the Google Adsense program as well?


Why Affiliate Marketing?


Well, simply because affiliate marketing is the easiest and probably the best way to earn profits online, unless otherwise you are a businessman and would rather sell your own products online than advertise other businessman’s products on your site. But even online retailers can benefit from affiliate marketing programs, because affiliate marketing actually works for merchants as well as it works for the affiliates.

Affiliate marketing, simply said, is a relationship or agreement made between two websites, with one site being the merchant’s website and the other being the affiliate’s site. In the relationship, the affiliate agrees to let the merchant advertise his products on the affiliate’s site. The merchant, on the other hand, would agree to pay the affiliate in whatever method they have agreed into. This would generally mean easy income for the affiliate, as he would do nothing but place the retailer’s ad on his site. This would also be very beneficial for the merchant, as getting affiliates to advertise their products would be a lot more affordable than hiring an advertising firm to promote their products.

There are a variety of methods on how the merchant would compensate the affiliate for his services, and for the webmaster, these methods simply translates to the method by which he would earn easy cash. Among the more common methods of compensation are the pay-per-click method, the pay-per-lead method, and the pay-per-sale method. The pay-per-click method is the method most preferred by affiliates, for their site’s visitor would only have to visit the advertiser’s site for them to gain money. The other two methods, on the other hand, are better preferred by merchants, as they would only have to compensate you if your visitor becomes one of their registrants or if the visitor would actually buy their products.

Getting much profit on affiliate marketing programs, however, does not depend so much on the compensation method is it does on the traffic generated by your site. A website that can attract more visitors would generally have the greater chance of profiting in affiliate marketing programs.

What about Google Adsense?

Google Adsense is actually some sort of an affiliate marketing program. In Google Adsense, Google act as the intermediary between the affiliates and the merchants. The merchant, or the advertiser, would simply sign up with Google and provide the latter with text ads pertaining to their products. These ads, which is actually a link to the advertiser’s website, would then appear on Google searches as well as on the websites owned by the affiliates, or by those webmasters who have signed up with the Google Adsense program.

While one can find a lot of similarities between Google Adsense and other affiliate marketing programs, you can also see a lot of differences. In Google Adsense, all the webmaster has to do is place a code on his website and Google takes care of the rest. The ads that Google would place on your site would generally be relevant to the content of your site. This would be advantageous both for you and for the advertiser, as the visitors of your site would more or less be actually interested with the products being advertised.

The Google Adsense program compensates the affiliate in a pay-per-click basis. The advertisers would pay Google a certain amount each time their ad on your site is clicked and Google would then forward this amount to you through checks, although only after Google have deducted their share of the amount. Google Adsense checks are usually delivered monthly. Also, the Google Adsense program provides webmasters with a tracking tool that allows you to monitor the earnings you actually get from a certain ad.

So, where do all of these lead us to?

Where else but to profits, profits and even more profits! Affiliate marketing programs and the Google Adsense program simply work, whether you are the merchant or the affiliate. For the merchant’s side, a lot of money can be saved if advertising effort is concentrated on affiliate marketing rather than on dealing with advertising firms. For the webmaster, you can easily gain a lot of profits just by doing what you do best, and that is by creating websites. And if you combine all your profits from both the Google Adsense program and other affiliate marketing programs, it would surely convert to a large amount of cash.

Preview Tools - Google Adsense: Familiarize Yourself with the Google Adsense Preview Tool

The Google Adsense Preview Tool allows you to preview the ads that may show on any web page thereby letting you make an educated decision on whether to add Google Adsense to your existing pages.

You can also view sample ad formats and colors which will allow you to see how the colors and formats you want to appear in your ads will look before they actually launch on your pages.

You can also view borders, backgrounds and text colors from the preview tool and by clicking preview you can see how these will look with actual ads.

You can also see geo-targeted location ads meaning you can see what ads users in Canada can see even if you live in Japan.

The Preview Tool is available in all active Adsense languages and is easy to install. For specific installation instructions, you’ll need to go to the Google Adsense Support site. Follow the instructions and click on the link provided and you’ll be a previewing genius in no time!

Who Benefits From Google Adsense Program

Here is a list of 11 types of websites that can benefit most from Google AdSense:
1.Great information sites with lots of content -- whether or not they have started generating revenue.
2.Narrow niche sites that haven't yet started generating revenue.
3.Sites that provide great information about high paying keywords...

Here is a list of 11 types of websites that can benefit most from Google AdSense:
1.Great information sites with lots of content -- whether or not they have started generating revenue.
2.Narrow niche sites that haven't yet started generating revenue.
3.Sites that provide great information about high paying keywords.

4.People who have a passion for a topic but have not yet created a website on that topic because they didn't know how to earn money from it.
5.Sites that currently use banner exchange programs and want to start generating some revenue instead.
6.Sites that currently offer banner advertising and want to increase revenue.
7.Sites too small to attract advertisers (or those who don't want to go through the time and effort to find relevant affiliate programs).
8.Sites with affiliate programs that aren't generating any or enough revenue.
9.Sites created by products like Ken Evoy's Site Build It! that focus on providing excellent content -- and earning money.
10.High traffic sites that contain sections or pages that aren't currently generating revenue.
11.Website publishers with extra advertising inventory.
In other words, AdSense allows publishers and web designers to focus on what they are interested in and do best -- producing the content of their sites -- without having to worry about finding advertisers or affiliate programs to make their sites profitable.

Monday, April 13, 2009

Video to Improve Google Ranking & Conversion

Good Video Content Will Give You a Competitive Edge

by : Chris Crum

Online video is consuming the web as we know it whether you like it or not. Some prefer text content over video in most cases, and that’s ok too. I don’t think text is going anywhere, but demand for video is on the rise from both consumers, and businesses looking to stay on top of their marketing. Just like not all text is great, not all video is great, but when done well, I think you will find that it offers plenty of reward.

Content and Reputation

Bad videos are a turn off for viewers. They must have value. Otherwise they’ll be viewed as a waste of time. If viewers see your videos as a waste of time, this is generally going to equate to wasted time on your part as well, and chances are that you put a whole lot more time into your videos than any viewer will. But even worse, if your videos are perceived as a waste of time by viewers, it’s going to reflect negatively on your brand, or at the very least upon your ability to offer useful and informative content.

Remember, while the rise in online video popularity is certainly evident, many people would just as soon obtain the information they’re looking for with text. In fact, this is a good reason to offer truly unique content with your videos. Developing a reputation for having solid unique content with them will give people a reason to watch them. The best videos provide a user experience that simply can’t be duplicated in text.

Robert Scoble cited a good example in a recent post. “Text is easier to consume. Easier to search. All that stuff. But here, let’s try something. You take 1,000 words to explain to me what the next game from EA looks like. I’ll do it in a minute or two of video. The video will beat your blog every time,” he declares.

Length is often a factor. As a rule, people generally do not want to watch lengthy videos unless they are either entertaining or truly useful to them. From a business standpoint, I believe you are going to have greater success with making the content as useful as possible in as little amount of time as possible.

Video Usability

Grantastic Designs Founder Grant Crowell writing for ReelSEO has a great article/podcast on web video usability. He discusses the need for video providers to have some kind of usability standards. In his article, Crowell talks about some factors that should be taken into consideration when providing video content:

- Location
- Features
- Testing

By location, he means, where it is being viewed. Is it being viewed on a website or in a stand-alone player? Is it on your own site or is it being viewed in an embedded player on someone else’s? Do you even offer the ability to embed your videos?

Apart from embedding availability, features of the video include things like the player itself, the navigation of that player, accessibility, search, image and audio quality, length, content, speed (buffering), conversions, and completion. Videos should also be tested. This means: lab testing, user testing, and analytics.

Engagement and Google

In Crowell’s article, he also talks about the engagement factor of videos. Being how user-engagement is of growing importance (and will likely continue to be as SERPs evolve), I wanted to hear some more of his thoughts on this, so I contacted him and we had a little chat. Following is what came of that:

Chris Crum: You refer to engagement as an active state, and I agree, but what kind of actions do you expect videos to inspire? Comments? Conversions?

Grant Crowell: The actions ultimately depend on the business model of the video owner. But the potential with video is far greater at engagement and conversions than with static content. The first step is getting attention. After that it can serve as a direct response or lead, or buzz (going viral), or branding.

Even within the video, you can have several calls-to-action, all clickable and with additional actionable items from them. (See our latest video interview at ReelSEO on Mixpo, for more on this.

“Conversions” can be both mini and macro, depending again on what are the business objectives of the video owner. A comment could likely be a mini-conversion. A hundred comments and 3rd party link popularity and buzz, well that could be a macro-conversion.

CC: SEO Bruce Clay recently speculated that as SERPs evolve, videos might make a difference in ranking. For example if two competing businesses have content of basically equal value, but only one of them has video, the one with video might be favored. How important do you think it’s going to be for businesses to offer some kind of video content on their sites?

GC: Video itself can be given an almost “unfair advantage” in the SERPs. We’ve demonstrated that at ReelSEO with how we’re able to have our own image icons show up from our videos for search results — directly from our ReelSEO.com site (not YouTube). I’ve even done a case study to show how [in] a video series I did on YouTube, the targeted keywords had my image icons show up higher that the entire local and regional media stories.

New Google SERP Features

Google recently announced 2 new improvements to Google Search. The first is an expanded list of related searches, and the second is the addition of longer search result descriptions.

The company says it’s deploying a new technology that better understands associations and concepts related to searches. Google explains:

…one of its first applications lets us offer you even more useful related searches (the terms found at the bottom, and sometimes at the top, of the search results page).

For example, if you search for [principles of physics], our algorithms understand that “angular momentum,” “special relativity,” “big bang” and “quantum mechanic” are related terms that could help you find what you need.

Google says it’s able to target more queries, more languages, and make suggestions more relevant to what users are looking for. We’ve heard Google talk about wanting to get better with intent-based search, and it looks like they’re now doing something about it.

“Additionally, we’re now offering refinements for longer queries — something that’s usually a challenging task,” says a post on the Official Google Blog. The feature is available in 37 languages all around the world.”

As for the longer snippets, users will see them when they search for longer queries (which users are using more of these days). They will display more text to show more of the keywords used in the query and how they are used on the page.

These changes may not be the final word in intent-based search. The “java” example discussed by Bruce Clay late last year isn’t addressed very well here. The related searches suggested when I search for that keyword do not include coffee or country related items. Still, the features are an indication that Google is indeed looking in this direction.

The longer snippets feature is not exactly delivering more relevant results than before, but it could go a long way toward helping users determine if results in fact are relevant by giving them more info to reach a conclusion.

RSS and Google Analytics Integration

FeedBlitz's new RSS service now enables bloggers, social media marketers and publishers to track RSS-driven click-throughs in Google Analytics (and also Omniture's Visual Sciences enterprise web site analytics solution). Further, FeedBlitz has made this feature available to our email marketing newsletter service as well.

FeedBlitz is now the only RSS service to enable publishers to view their RSS-driven activity in these two popular web analytics packages.

It's trivial to set up. For RSS feeds, go to RSS - Settings, and choose the click tracking service you want and save. For email newsletters, go to Newsletters - Settings - Content Settings - Tracking and More and pick the tracking option you want, and save. That's all you have to do. Well, ok, that and wait for the metrics to appear in your web analytics results.

For the FeedBlitz RSS service, changes are immediate. Email service click-through changes are reflected in the next mailing. It's OK to specify the click through settings in both locations if you use both services; a click-through from an email based on a FeedBlitz feed will properly identify itself as being email, not RSS, driven.

Looking at the results in Google Analytics

All the results are visible in Traffic Sources - Campaigns in your Google Analytics dashboard.

For clicks that originate from your RSS feed, Google will record "FeedBlitz" as the source, "FeedBlitzRss" as the medium, and the feed path (the part of your url after "feeds.feedblitz.com") as the campaign. Pick these options from the "Dimension" drop down on that page the campaigns page.

For clicks that originate from an email newsletter, "FeedBlitz" is still the source, but the medium will be "FeedBlitzEmail", the campaign will identify when the mailing went out (e.g. "Nightly 2009-04-04") and the content will identify the feedblitz list ID.

Now you can easily review the effectiveness of your email newsletters and RSS feeds and determine what changing settings will do (such as switching between full and partial content, for example).

Omniture Visual Sciences

FeedBlitz adds the "From" parameter, enabling you to differentiate between RSS and email clicks, and similarly varies the parameters on the email side to enable you to tell which mailing led to which click through.

RSS Service Recap

With this feature announcement, I want to briefly revisit our original posting announcing the service. In it I said "You'll see that the FeedBlitz RSS feed service will rapidly evolve over the coming weeks." A bold claim. How are we doing? Since that launch, about 10 days ago, this is what we've added:

Commitment fulfilled. FeedBlitz is keeping its promises and not letting our RSS publishers down. If you can't say the same about your RSS service, then please register for a 30-day free trial. Tune the Blitzed version of your RSS feed and then, once you're happy, make the switch.

Sunday, April 12, 2009

How To Achieve Top Google Rankings

Masters Of The Google Universe:
How To Achieve Top Google Rankings

For years, it has been well known that Google's search algorithm is driven by the number and quality of links pointing to a particular URL. And as a result, it was all the rage for some time to buy links on web pages that had a high Google PageRank (PR).

But in March of 2007, Google's mouthpiece Matt Cutts declared that Google was going to fight back against Paid Links. Google put a shot across the bow of many online marketers, letting them know that the days of easily buying links from high PageRank pages in order to influence a website's ranking in Google were over.

The Shot Heard Around The World

With Matt Cutts declaration, a world full of online marketers began to cry foul. It was said that "They can't do that!"

But the truth was and is that the Google Search Algorithm is Google's intellectual property, and therefore, Google can do anything they want within their algorithms - no matter who those changes might hurt or help.


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By the end of the Summer of 2007, the people crying foul had quieted down a bit and got back to the business of trying to find new ways to manipulate their website's rankings inside of the Google search results. That is the way it has always been and always will be.

The summer of 2007 was just such an oddity... For me, it has always been exciting to challenge the brains at Google to get my websites to rank well within Google's search algorithms. But for some reason, at that moment in time, many of those who held the top rankings in Google felt as if it was their God-given right to be at the top of Google's search results, and how dare Google oppose God's decree in this matter.

Yep, I know I am going to catch flak for that statement - comparing a few webmasters to religious zealots - but that is how I roll sometimes.

For me, Matt Cutts was telling people to work harder to actually "earn" what they have been given. For me, it was a chance to re-dedicate myself to the goal of ranking well in Google for competitive keywords. I did not have to change anything I was already doing, because I have never gained a single ranking in Google by paying for a link from any web page. (wink)

Google's Search Engineers Are Not Foolish

Matt Cutts has said time and again that Google does not want to attack any problem in their search algorithms by manually deleting any participant in the Google search ranking game.

Instead, Google in every case wants to program a solution to address a particular bad practice.

I guess it might be easier for me to understand since I am also a computer programmer. It is a hobby I really enjoy, and I exercise my mind with computer programming anytime I want to improve my own websites or to build a new website. I keep my brain sharp by solving problems in computer code.

So, whenever I see Google making moves in one direction or another, I try to visualize how I would solve their algorithm problems in computer code.


Visit SiteProNews for the Best in Webmaster News, Tools and Blog Posts!

In my mind, solving the paid links issue was a super-easy solution. Just look at the pages linking to a particular website, and then do a cross-comparison of the PageRank of all of those linking pages. If all of the pages linking to a particular URL have a PageRank of Four or higher, then chances are that those links were artificially created, through some kind of paid linking system.

Let me explain this in an example, where all of the sample web pages have 100 inbound links each:

If Site A has all of its 100 links on pages that have a PageRank of 4 or higher, then that is unnatural and therefore suspect.

If Site B has all of its 100 links on pages that have a PageRank of 0, then those links offer no value to the Internet community as a whole, and therefore Site B should not measured as a quality search result.

If Site C has a mix of PageRank 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 links, then that is more natural in its structure and it also shows that some of the links are considered to have value in the Internet community as a whole. Therefore, Site C has proven itself worthy above Site A and Site B in Google's search results.

This example should show in no uncertain terms how easy it was for Google to properly address the issue of paid links and to put a stop to people using paid links to manipulate their websites' ranking in Google's search algorithms.

Publication Standards

A couple years back, I wrote another article discussing this concept in relationship to article marketing. You can read that article with third-party commentary from Chris McElroy, aka NameCritic, on the Article Content Provider Blog.

Forget Expensive PPC Advertising - There is an Alternative!

In a nutshell, I was discussing the role of article directories in the article marketing industry. Again, this solution came to me from my programming mind. The simple way for Google to have dealt with all of the junk articles that have been written for the purpose of building links to a website is to look at the article in the context of where that article is published.

The article marketing carpet bombers send their articles to hundreds of article directories to get hundreds of links pointing to their website. But the role of the article directory has always been to be a repository where newsletter publishers and webmasters could go to find articles that they would like to reprint in their own newsletters and on their own websites.

Some article directory managers bring a commitment to providing publishers with only quality articles. Other article directory managers approve anything and everything sent to them.

Through computer programming, it is relatively easy to identify which websites are article directories and which ones are not.

If an article is of good quality, then niche website publishers will find the article and put it on their own website. If the article is a crap article, then the only websites that will accept it are those article directories that publish anything and everything given to them.

As a result, it is easy for Google to look at the Linking Portfolio (list of publishing websites) of a single article and to see which articles were considered worthy of reprint by human reviewers. If the article only exists on article directory websites, then the article must not provide any real value to other people. But if the article is of good quality, the article will be able to be located on article directories AND on niche websites.

This concept very elegantly feeds into Google's overall strategy of determining which web pages people recommend to others. After all, if you look at Google's PageRank, it is very simply a system which measures how many people have voted on the quality or value of a particular web page.

Expanding On Google's PageRank Formula

Google loves any system that they can conceive to measure how much value the overall Internet community gives to a particular web page.

Google naturally treats links found in the Yahoo! Business Directory and the Open Directory as higher value links, because the search engineers at Google understand that links in these directories are all approved by a human being.

Google also gives extra value to social bookmarking websites, because the concept behind social bookmarking is that individuals "bookmark" a web page when they find that web page to offer good value to its readers.

Google openly dislikes paid links and can easily identify those paid links, without having to jump through too many hoops. (This should not be confused with paying for a service that will help you increase your rankings in Google. Paying a service provider to provide services to you is very different than just paying for links on high PageRank web pages.)

Google also appreciates reprint articles that have a Linking Portfolio beyond the article directories. Once again, Google appreciates reprint articles that are shown to provide real value to individuals in the greater Internet community.

When you take a close look at the original premise of Google's PageRank, it has always been about creating systems that measure the value of a web pages to find which web pages will best answer a searcher's question. Rightfully so, Google believes that the best way to ensure that they are able to give their users good quality search results is to look at what web pages others have already deemed useful.

Herein rests the secret to ranking well in Google's search results. If you can create content that people will find useful, interesting, and valuable to others, then Google's search algorithms will look favorably upon your website.

Author's Note - This article was originally published at: karmaseo.com .


About The Author
Bill Platt has written about SEO and article marketing for a number of years. As the owner of LinksAndTraffic.com Bill has also been providing search engine optimization services to his clients for a number of years. If you are currently spending at least $1000 per month on pay-per-click search advertising, you owe it to yourself to review and consider Bill's Performance Based SEO Service at: linksandtraffic.com/seo-services/search-marketing.html

Thursday, April 2, 2009

Google AdSense for Domains

Last week, Google announced that they were going to roll out AdSense for Domains to all publishers. It’s really easy to get started and serve ads on your parked domains.

Google has created a number of tutorials to help you migrate your parked domains over to Google’s recently relaunched AdSense for Domains platform.

Before this, you had to apply individually and have well over 700,000 impressions per month in your account (to prove that you know how to generate traffic.)

Now, it’s available for everyone, easily, and free (GoDaddy charges you a fee to park your domains to earn cash.)

Miscellaneous Google Adsense Tips and Tools Collection


Google Adsense is an amazing contextual advertising program that lets you earn revenue from your site by a variety of revenue generating programs. Pay per click ads, Adsense for search, referrals for Firefox with Google toolbar, Picassa, Google Pack and the adsense program itself. This is a compilation of common Google tips and tools to make more money from Google Adsense.

Google Adsense Guidelines

Adsense Starter Demos

  • Google Adsense Tour - introducing you to the Adsense program.
  • Getting Started Demo: learn to sign in, copying and pasting your code, setting up alternate ads, and using your Competitive Ad Filter.
  • Help with Ad Code Demo: troubleshoot basic problems when implementing your code. Also covers how to implement your code using two different types of WYSIWYG software.
  • Payment Demo: learn about the AdSense payment cycle, from a click on your ads to money in the bank!
  • Optimization Demo: learn how to use ad size and placement to maximize your AdSense revenue.

Track Adsense Income, Statistics and Clicks

  • Adsense Notifier - Firefox extension that displays your Adsense earnings on the Firefox statusbar.
  • SysSense - personal desktop Google AdSense monitor. It keeps your current Google AdSense information in the Windows system tray.
  • Adsense Widget - a Mac Dashboard widget that automatically logs into your AdSense Google account and displays the last 6-days of revenue generated from your Google advertising account.
  • Google Adsense Yahoo Widget - displays the current income directly from your Google AdSense account.
  • Stats for AdSense widget - allows you to view your Google AdSense™ reports directly from your Mac OS X Dashboard.
  • Adsense Status - GoogleDesktop plugin to View earnings information from your Google Adsense account in the Google Desktop sidebar. Available information: page impressions, clicks, page CTR, page eCPM, and your earnings.
  • Adsense Alert - desktop client monitors your adsense earnings.
  • Performancing Metrics - a free professional grade blog statistics service that track limited adsense click data
  • Adsense earnings RSS feed - a simple script that will create an RSS feed with your daily Adsense earnings to track via your regular feed reader.
  • Google AdSense Charts and Graphs - chart your adsense data in a multidimensional line charts.
  • AdSenseLog is a tool for checking and analyzing your Adsense ads data (Content, Search, Custom/URL channels and Referrals).

View / Test Adsense Ads

  • Google AdSense preview tool - addition to the right-click menu for Windows Internet Explorer 6.x, allowing you to preview the ads that may show on any web page.
  • Adsense Preview - Preview the Google ads that may show on any web page.
  • Google AdSense Sandbox Tool - see what sort of Google AdSense ads will appear based on content or keywords. See up to 20 sample AdSense ads for the URL or keywords.
  • Overture Keyword Tool - suggest keyword bid amount and keyword suggestions, which help you target high paying keywords.
  • Google Adwords Keyword Tool - generates potential keywords for your ad campaign and reports their Google statistics, including search performance and seasonal trends.

Google Adsense Wordpress Plugins

Google Adsense Optimization Tips

Alternate Ads

  • Alternate ads - allows you to utilize your ad space in the event that Google is unable to serve targeted ads to your page.
  • Alternate Url - provides a 50/50 Revenue Share, full global coverage monthly payments automatic referral income, family safe ads, paypal supported and gives detailed stats.
  • AlterNut Ad - pays you a flat rate every month in return for you displaying thier ad rather than the PSA. Invite only.
  • Default Ads - load your affiliate or other ads into DefaultAds and generate a link to include in your Google Adsense alternate ad URL. They show their own ads 1 out of every 100 impressions for this service.

Adsense Chats and Forums

Miscellaneous

  • Google AdSense Stats Syndrome (GASS) - the compulsive need to check AdSense stats every 15 minutes or so to see how much you’ve earned since your prior login. more.
This post will be regularly updated. Suggest a link in the comments. Check out the Google Adsense Books for sale on Amazon.

Those Against AdSense

It’s always a good practice to hear the other side of the story when rounding up resources on a topic, especially one as controversial as AdSense. Many experts argue that AdSense isn’t the best choice for publishers to monetize their content. Here are a few articles that criticize AdSense.

Dear AdSense, You Broke My Heart
Problogger Darren Rowse’s open letter to AdSense about why he was disappointed in its decision to change the referral policy for publishers outside the US.

Dear AdSense

Have You Weaned Your Blog from AdSense Yet?
A convincing argument for moving from AdSense’s cost-per-click structure to CPM ads and other affiliate programs.

Why You Can’t Make Money Blogging
Copyblogger’s Brian Clark provides some compelling reasons to ditch AdSense and sell products that solve real-world problems.

Why You Cant

10 Reasons Why People Hate Google AdSense
A round-up of thought-provoking reasons as to why Google ads repel publishers. Some of the reasons include: the ads are ugly, Adsense is everywhere, poor email support with the Google team and many others.

About the author

Glen Stansberry writes about creative web development at Web Jackalope. You can get to know him by following him on Twitter.

AdSense Forums and Communities


Webmaster World AdSense Forum
The WMW forum is by far the best forum for getting expert advice on AdSense. A member of the Google AdSense team actually reviews all the threads and answers questions, so the information is legitimate.

Wmw Forum

Digital Point AdSense Forum
Digital Point’s AdSense forum isn’t as strict as the Webmaster World forum, so there is a lot of engagement but less experienced users and less informed advice.

Forum

Jowl Comm’s AdSense Chat

Forum

SEOChat
SEOChat doesn’t have an entire forum dedicated to Google AdSense, but it does have a thriving forum for affiliate marketing in which many AdSense topics come up on a regular basis.

AdSense Books

If you’re looking for an entire collection of tips and advice on making the most out of AdSense, you might want to try a print book instead. Plenty of excellent AdSense articles are available online, but on the whole, it is easier to find more accurate information in print media. Here are some of the most popular books on AdSense.

The Best Damn Google AdSense Book
Best Damn

Google Advertising Tools: Cashing in with AdSense, AdWords and the Google APIs

The AdSense Code

Google AdSense Secrets

The Google AdSense Millionaire


AdSense WordPress Plug-Ins

If you want to integrate AdSense in your existing website, here are some plug-ins to help display your ads.

AdSense Manager
The AdSense Manager widget allows for the automatic creation of AdSense ad zones on your WordPress blog. The plug-in also supports other ad networks, such as YPN, AdBrite and Commission Junction.

Adsense Manager

Easy AdSenser
Easy AdSenser is a feature-filled plug-in that allows you to easily insert AdSense into your posts and layout. It has an extremely user-friendly interface, with lots of features that make adding AdSense much easier than it is with other plug-ins.

AdSense Revenue Sharing
Share AdSense earnings with co-authors using the AdSense Revenue Sharing plug-in.

AdSense Revenue Sharing

All in One AdSense and YPN
Use the All in One AdSense and YPN plug-in to automatically insert YPN and AdSense ads into your existing blog posts.

AdSense Under Image
If a post has an image, this plug-in automatically inserts an AdSense block under the image.

AdSense Deluxe 2
Another plug-in to automatically insert AdSense ad units into blog posts.

AdSense Deluxe 2

Google AdSense for Feeds
A simple plug-in that places AdSense in your blog’s feed.

Ozh’ Who Sees Ads
Determines what type of visitor will see ads on your website. This plug-in allows publishers to hide ads from regular visitors and show them only to search visitors.

Who Sees Ads Wp25

AdSense WordPress Themes

WordPress is the most popular blogging platform, so it’s no surprise that a few themes come AdSense-ready, with ad placements already determined.

Pro Sense

Prosense

Get Some!

CognoBlue

Cognoblue

TechBlue

Techblue

Elite Circle

Amazing Grace

Amazing Grace

Amazing

Optimization Tips

Like any ad system, AdSense can be optimized to generate more clicks and revenue. Here are some tips to help boost AdSense performance.

Adsense Success Stories
Several examples of websites that increased their earnings significantly with Adsense. The success stories talk a lot about ad optimization, etc.

Google AdSense Tips
Google Blogscoped provides an excellent collection of AdSense tips based on its experience with implementing Google ads.

Google Blogscoped AdSense

My top 5 tips for increasing adsense earnings (without increasing traffic)
Experiment with color and position, use different adverts for different dates, use content targeting, referrals and take care of the SEO.

Screenshot

Eye-Tracking Studies by Jakob Nielsen
Great eye-tracking examples that show where users’ eyes start and end up on a page.

Eye-tracking

Adsense Tips, Layout Optimization Tricks for Higher CTR
A collection of excellent do’s and don’ts for new publishers, as well as advice for more advanced AdSense users.

Rotate Google AdSense Ad Colors : Reduce Ad Blindness
One of the many enemies of publishers who rely on ads is banner blindness. Rotating ad colors is a good way to combat banner blindness, resulting in more clicks on ads.

Google AdSense Tips, Tricks and Secrets
Popular SEO blogger Michael Gray has an extensive post on various AdSense tips and performance boosters.

AdSense Tips Tricks Secrets

How to Display Ads Only to Search Visitors
Click-through ratios are much higher if you show your AdSense units only to visitors who were referred by search engines. Here’s an article on how to implement that functionality on your website.

Using the Competitive Ad Filter to Increase AdSense Earnings
Learn how to block made-for-AdSense websites as competitors, allowing only the best and most relevant ads to show on your units.

100 Google AdSense Tips
While this article is a few years old, it still has some very valuable tips on how to optimize Google AdSense. Perfect for the beginner.

20+ Practical and Ethical Tips to Earn More Revenue from Google AdSense
eTechBuzz shows us some useful and ethical AdSense tips.

20 Practical Tips

Blogmitize!
The Official AdSense Blog has a post on how to make the most money from your blog layout.

Little Known ‘Boring’ Websites that Make Incredible Money with AdSense
An article highlighting that nearly anyone with a niche website can make money from AdSense.

Getting Started with AdSense

Because of the popularity of AdSense, many so-called “experts” out there try to give “inside information” or sell their secrets in the form of ebooks. If you’re truly a beginner to AdSense, use the official AdSense help database that Google provides.

Here are some “getting started” articles by a few trusted authors.

Problogger’s AdSense Tips for Bloggers
Darren Rowse’s excellent eight-part series will get you well on your way to making money from AdSense.

AdSense Tips For Bloggers

The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Effective AdSense Link Units Optimization
A great rundown of the different types of link units and how they’re best used in a website layout.

Ultimate Beginner's Guide

Where Should I Place Google Ads on my Page?
The Google AdSense team has made a helpful map showing the different regions of a website layout where AdSense units perform the best.

Official AdSense Resources

Google has provided some official tools and resources to help publishers get started with AdSense.

Google AdSense Help Center
A database of questions and answers about the AdSense program.

Help Center

Inside AdSense Blog
The official AdSense blog. Find news, tips and other features about the ad system here.

AdSense Community Forum
Have an AdSense question? Ask a community of publishers and the AdSense team.

Official Optimization Tips
A collection of tips provided by the AdSense team.

Official AdSense Channel on YouTube
Instructional videos and interviews by successful AdSense publishers.

Interest-based advertising with Google AdSense
Just recently Google announced the launch of interest-based advertising. This help section addresses the new mechanism and explains how you can benefit from it.

Google AdSense Firefox Extensions


AdSense Notifier
This extension displays your AdSense earnings in the status bar.

AdSense Preview
Check what Google ads would be displayed if they were shown on a particular page with this preview tool.

AdSense Preview

Money Quake
Money Quake allows you to see your real-time earnings for many popular advertising programs, including AdSense.

AdSense Preview

GraphSense
GraphSense gives you a visual look at your AdSense reports by adding graphs to the interface. As of this post, the extension is still classified as “experimental,” so you’ll have to log in to Mozilla to install it.

Graphsense

Google AdSense Tools by Online

Contextual Ads Preview/Comparison Tool
This comparison tools comes in handy when you compare AdSense ads to those of other advertisement services (Chitika, Yahoo). You also have the ability to customize the colors and view what ads a certain URL would be likely to display.

Pubmatic

Google AdSense Calculator
This AdSense Calculator is designed to help you to predict changes in your earnings depending on improvement (or deterioration) of Page Impressions, Click Through Rate and Cost Per Click. You can download further calculators here.

Screenshot

WordTracker
During the search, people use different keywords. Using this tool, you can find the most effective words before deciding what content to include on your page. Not free, but the free trial is available.

Traffic Estimator Sandbox
To use this tool, you need an AdWords account. This traffic estimator helps you to figure out what keywords result in the highest paying AdSense ads (more details on uphook).

Screenshot

Pubmatic
While Pubmatic isn’t strictly an AdSense tool, it will definitely help you earn more money from your website by optimizing your ads. With each page view, Pubmatic determines whether showing an AdSense ad or an ad from a different network would be best, based on the CPM.

Pubmatic

AlterNut Ad
Instead of earning nothing from the PSA ads that Google fills the page with when it has no ads to show, earn a set fee by giving AlterNut Ad your unused PSA ads.

Google AdSense Tools

Google AdSense is a simple and low-risk way for publishers to quickly monetize their content. The pay-per-click ad system has created an opportunity for anyone to instantly have advertising on their website, without the hassle of having to actively sell ad space. AdSense makes up a good portion of the advertising revenue for many websites, and other websites may use AdSense to earn the bulk of their revenues. Either way, AdSense is an excellent system for monetizing your content.

In this post we present an ultimate collection of resources, tools and tips to help you make the most out of Google AdSense. Among other things, this post covers various Google AdSense tools, Firefox-extensions, WordPress-plugins and related resources.

Please feel free to suggest related tools in the comments to this post. You may also be interested in our post Google AdSense: Facts, FAQs and Tools that was published two years ago.

1. Google AdSense Tools

iPhone AdSense Statistics Application
SenseApp is a program that lets you track your Google Adsense earnings on your Apple iPhone.

Screenshot

AdSense Earnings Tool
Free and fast tool to monitor adsense earnings in realtime. This tool posts all the correct post fields to Googles universal Account Services login and collects information about your earnings. You’ll able to see today, yesterday, this month and since last payment earnings. You don’t need to log in to Google anymore.

Screenshot

Google AdSense Toolbox
Type any web page URL (e.g. cnn.com) or keywords (e.g. web development), select a country (optional) and hit Enter to see the latest Google Ads that are contextual and geo-targeted.

Google AdSense Preview Tool
an addition to the right-click menu for Windows Internet Explorer 6.x, allowing you to preview the ads that may show on any webpage. With just a few clicks, you can see what ads may appear on your new webpages, or make an educated decision on whether to add AdSense to your existing site pages.

Google Search-Based Keyword Tool
The search-based keyword tool allows you to find high-paying keywords to target, based on the domain name you specify.

Search Based Kw Tool

Google Traffic Estimator
The Google Traffic Estimator is an easy way to determine the search volume of certain keywords, and it shows related keywords and their volumes as well.

SpyFu
SpyFu allows you to look up any website and see how much it is spending on AdSense, how it ranks for each keyword, and which keywords it buys. The tool is quite useful for researching competitors.

Spyfu

adsblacklist
Identify and block low-paying advertisers and increase ROI with AdSense.

Maybe you need ! Official Google Information

Here is a list of notable resources if you want to find out, and stay on top off Google’s Adsense program. I’ve included some obvious links and some low volume forums as well, in an effort to be through. Be careful about what you read and try if you venture too far off the beaten path.

Official Google Information

  • Google Adsense : This is the main Google site where you apply for Adsense, log in to get your adsense code, and view your reports.
  • Google Adsense Case Studies: If you’re looking to see examples of Google adsense in action these are a few sites google has profiled.

News or Blogs About Google Adsense

  • JenSense: Jenstar who publishes this blog is the moderator of the WMW and Search Engine Watch forums on Adsense. This blog covers all contextual advertising programs not just adsense, but is one of the best sources for information about the adsense program. Additionally when they make a change to the programs terms and conditions, this is the place I go for an explanation I can understand. She is also a regular speaker for contextual advertising programs at conferences and tradeshows.
  • Problogger: This Blog is run by Darren Rowse who is part of the Breaking News Blog Network. You will get some good subjects brought up here on a regular basis. I’ve only been subscribed for a few weeks but this one is definitely a worthwhile read.
  • Make Easy Money With Google Adsense Blog: This is the companion blog to the ‘Make Easy Money with Google‘ book. Not deep in coverage, but it is fairly new. See my ‘Make Easy Money With Google Adsense Review‘ for more information.

Adsense Related Forums or Newsgroups

  • WMW Google Adsense Forum: There’s lot of information here, not too much in the ways of ‘tricks’ or ’secrets’. A major advantage of this forum is Adsense Advisor (Google’s Adsense representative) reads, answers questions, and posts news here. Check out the Adsense Library for archives of the top threads.
  • Digital Point Google Adsense Forum: Much looser and less formal than webmaster world. This is an active fast growing forum, however there aren’t as many seasoned adsense professionals here as there are in other places. Members drop URL’s to their own sites looking for help, or advice. Makes it a great spot to see things in action.
  • Search Engine Watch Google Adsense Forum: Again not as formal as WMW, but not quite as loose as Digital Point. If you read for a little while and use the reputation rankings you’ll get a feel for who knows what they are talking about and who’s just yakkin’. That said you will still see some good topics here on a regular basis from more seasoned adsense professionals.
  • Google Adsense Blog: Nothing to speak of at the time of publication. http://adsense.blogspot.com requires a login, Adwords has a dedicated blog so we can only hope.
  • Google Groups Adsense Publishers: Not a very active forum, and not much in the way of tips.
  • WebProWorld Adsense Adwords Forum: Adwords and Adsense are lumped together here.
  • SEOChat Adsense Forum: This one has Adsense mixed in with other affiliate programs.
  • SEOGuy Adsense Forum:
  • AssociateForums Adsense:

If you know of any other forums, blogs or news sites, let me know and I’ll add them in.

Related Articles

Make Easy Money with Google

I had seen Make Easy Money with Google (aff) being mentioned in quite a few spots and was pretty interested in reading it. Due a problem with something else I ordered I received a credit, so I applied it towards the purchase of this book.

Make Easy Money with Google is written by Eric Giguere who’s website can be found at EricGiguere.com. He’s written a few other programming books, none of which I’ve read (not my subjects). The book has a companion website/blog MakeEasyMoneywithGoogle.com.

The book is written in conversational style, with the author talking and explaining things to three fictional characters. Each has different styles, goals, and approaches to building a website with Adsense. While you will probably identify with one character over the others, all of them are important to the story. This approach makes for a book that’s very easy read and understand (KUDOS Eric!), and at just over 250 pages you can probably get through it in few days or a long weekend. In the first part of the book the authors spends considerable time and effort explaining how to register a domain, get hosting , build a simple website and publish it. In the second part of the book he goes into explaining the basics of the adsense program, how to get different size ad units, choose colors. He very briefly goes into design, placement, and keyword theory.

The Good: This book is very easy to read and comprehend. If you’ve never published a website before and want to learn how to do it, and make some money using adsense, this is the perfect book for you.

The Bad: If you have built more than 6 websites in your life, or are already meeting adsense’s minimum monthly payment threshold, there’s probably not much in here for you.

When all is said and done this is a good book, and is best suited for new or inexperienced web publishers, or people with little or no experience with contextual advertising programs. If you read some of the reviews from amazon or other places you’ll see this book isn’t well received by the “techie” types who think it’s too basic, which is unfair, as I don’t think the book was intended for them. However the reviews clearly show there is “demand” for a book covering advanced contextual advertising concepts, implementation and theory, if someone is willing to go after it.

Adsense Script Tools

I was hoping to find more adsense tools to review and recommend, however I never received anything so we’ll go with what I was able to find.

Adsense Script Tools

These are the tiny little programs you install on your server (blech!) or locally on your machine that help you analyze your adsense clicks, CTR and earnings. Some of them are easy, some of them are difficult, and some of them help you make pretty graphs. To be honest none of them are worth recommending. You could do just as good a job by setting up your channels properly and dumping a CSV file into excel. If someone has a specific one or wants to send me a review copy of thier software, I will look at it. DO NOT send me anything that has to be installed on a server. I run multiple websites on multiple hosting companies, so I don’t need something that requires more maintenance thank you very much.

Adsense Preview Tools

The Adsense Sandbox comes via Digital Point. You put in a URL and it lets you preview what ads are most likely to appear on a URL. Pretty handy IMHO.

Adsense Tracking

While not set up to be an Adsense tracking tool per se, the free log analyzer from AddFreeStats is actually pretty good. You put a small graphic tracking bug on the bottom of each of your pages and it gives you standard logging reports. You can also activate adsense tracking to find out what ads are being clicked on what pages. Combine this with an excel spreadsheet and channels and you are good to go. You can upgrade to a paid version and get an invisible tracking bug. TIP: Lock down your stats under a password, I’m fascinated how many people leave that open.

Adsense in Action

Probably one of the best things you can do to increase your adsense earnings is to go and look how other people are doing things. The adsense case studies are one place. While these are Google approved you really don’t have an idea how successful they are. So you’d be much better off finding someone you know is in the UPS Club. Jason Calacanis who runs Weblogs Inc is on a quest to make 1 Million dollars a year from Adsense. While I do give Jason a hard time sometimes, I do actually admire what he’s built, and think there are some very valuable lessons to be learned from looking at the websites owns. Darren Rowse of ProBlogger also has two sites I really like the Digital Camera Review and Camera Phone Review. Don’t be a wanker and copy exactly what they’ve done, it’s bad form. Instead look at them, learn from them, and use it as inspiration.

Ads Google Tips & Triks

I’ve been reading a few forums and blogs about Google Adsense tips lately, and thought it would be helpful to consolidate as many as possible in one place without the comments. I’ve also thrown in a few tips of my own. We start out with some of the basic general stuff and move to the more specific topics later on.

Build an Empire?

When you’re deciding to become a website publisher you will fall into one of two broad categories:

  • Publish 100 websites that each earn $1 a day profit
  • Publish 1 website that earns $100 a day profit

The reality of it is, most people end up somewhere in between. Having 100 websites leaves you with maintenance, management and content issues. Having one website leaves you open to all sort of fluctuations (search engines algorithm’s, market trends, etc). You can adapt your plan on the way, but you’ll have an easier time if you start out going in the direction of where you want to end up.

General or Niche

You can build your website around general topics or niche ones. Generally speaking niche websites work better with adsense. First off the ad targeting is much better. Secondly as you have a narrow focus your writing naturally becomes more expert in nature. Hopefully this makes you more authority in your field.

If this is your first try at building an adsense website, make it about something you enjoy. It will make the process much easier and less painful to accomplish. You should however make sure that your topic has enough of an ad inventory and the payout is at a level you are comfortable with. You may love medieval folk dancing, but the pool of advertisers for that subject is very small (in fact it’s currently zero).

Once you’ve gotten the hang of how Adsense works on a website, you are going to want to dabble in some high paying keywords, you may even be tempted to buy a high paying keyword list. This does come with some dangers. First off the level of fraud is much higher on the big money terms. Secondly there is a distortion of the supply and demand relationship for these terms. Everyone wants ads on their website that make $35 or more a click, however the number of advertisers who are willing to pay that much is pretty limited. Additionally the competition for that traffic is going to be stiff. So, don’t try to run with the big dogs if you can’t keep up. If you have to ask if you’re a big dog, then chances are, you’re not. I have used a high dollar keywords report from cashkeywords.com and was pleased with my results (see cash keywords free offer recap).

New Sites, Files and Maintenance

When you’re building a new site don’t put adsense on it until it’s finished. In fact I’d go even farther and say don’t put adsense on it until you have built inbound links and started getting traffic. If you put up a website with “lorem ipsum” dummy or placeholder text, your adsense ads will almost certainly be off topic. This is often true for new files on existing websites, especially if the topic is new or different. It may take days or weeks for google’s media bot to come back to your page and get the ads properly targeted. TIP: If you start getting lots of traffic from a variety of IP’s you will speed this process up dramatically.

I like to build my sites using include files. I put the header, footer and navigation in common files. It makes it much easier to maintain and manage. I also like to put my adsense code in include files. If I want/need to change my adsense code, it’s only one file I have to work with. TIP: I also use programming to turn the adsense on or off. I can change one global variable to true or false and my adsense ads will appear or disappear.

Managing URL’s and channels

Adsense channels is one area where it’s really easy to go overboard with stats. You can set up URL channels to compare how one website is doing to another. You can also set up sub channels for each URL. If you wanted to you do something channels like this:

  • domain1.com - 728 banner
  • domain1.com - 336 block
  • domain1.com - text link
  • domain2.com - 728 banner
  • domain2.com - image banner
  • domain2.com - 336 block
  • domain3.com - 300 block

While this is great for testing and knowing who clicks where and why, it makes your reporting a little wonky. Your total number will always be correct but when you look at your reports with a channel break down things will get displayed multiple times and not add up to correct total. Makes things pretty confusing, so decide if you really need/want that level of reporting detail. TIP: At the very least you want to know what URL is generating the income so be sure to enter distinct URL channels.

Site Design and Integration


Once you know you are going to put adsense on your website you’re going to have to consider where to put it. If this is new site it’s easier, if it’s an existing site it’s more difficult. While there are some people who will be able to do it, in most cases I’d say if you just slap the adsense code in, you’ll end up with a frankensite monster (props to Tedster of WMW for the buzzword). While every website is different, Google has published some heat maps showing the optimal locations. No surprise that the best spots are middle of the page and left hand side. Now I’ve done really well by placing it on the right, but you should know why you’re doing it that way before hand, and be prepared to change it if it doesn’t work out.

Google has also has published a list of the highest performing ad sizes:

  • 336×280 large rectangle
  • 300×250 inline rectangle
  • 160×600 wide skyscraper

From the sites that I run, I do really well with the 336 rectangle and 160 skyscraper. My next best performing ad size is the 728 leaderboard, I don’t really use the 300 inline rectangle too often. So really it depends on how well you integrate these into your site. Placement can have a dramatic effect on performance. TIP: When working on a new site or new layout you may want to give each location it’s own channel for a little while until you understand the users behavior.

Another ‘trick’ that can increase your CTR is by blending your adsense into your body copy. For example if your body copy is black, remove the adsense border and make the title, text, and URL black.TIP: Try changing all of your page hyperlinks to a high contrast color (like dark red or a bold blue) then change the adsense title to the same color.

The one area where I’ve found blended ads don’t perform as well is forums, especially ones with a high volume of repeat members. Regular visitors develop banner blindness pretty quickly. One ‘trick’ to keep the ads from being ignored is to randomize the color and even the placement. As with any of the decisions about location, placement and color it’s a trade off. How much do you emphasize the ads without annoying your visitors. Remember it’s better to have a 1% CTR with 500 regular visitors as opposed to a 5% CTR with 50 visitors. TIP: For forums try placing the adsense ads directly above or below the the first forum thread.

Using Images

One of the latest ’secrets’ to make the rounds is using images placed directly above or below an adsense leaderboard. This has been used for a while but came out in a digital point forum thread where a member talked about quadrupling their CTR. Basically you set up the adsense code in a table with four images that line up directly with the ads. Whether or not this is deceptive is fuzzy and very subjective. Obviously four blinking arrows would be ‘enticing people to click’ and be against the adsense TOS. However placing pictures of 4 laptops over laptops ads isn’t, so use your best judgment here and look at it from the advertiser or Google’s perspective. If you have a question as to your implementation being ‘over the line’ write to adsense and ask them to take a look.

As far as using the images, I’ve done it and can tell you it definitely works. You get the best results when the images ‘complete the story the ads are telling’. For example if you have ads about apple pies, use pictures of freshly baked apple pies, instead of granny smith, Macintosh, pink lady, and braeburn apples. TIP: Don’t limit yourself to using images only on that size ad unit, it works just as well with the other sizes, like the 336 rectangle.

Added:
I got a little criticizm for this and rightly so, as I wasn’t specific as I could have been. Do not use very identifiable brand name or products for your images. Use generic non-specific stock images whenever possible and appropriate.

Multiple Ad Units

Another way to increase ad revenue is to use multiple ad units. According to Google’s TOS you are allowed to post up to three ad units per page. Similar to standard search results the highest paying ad units will be served first and the lowest being served last. If there is enough of an ad inventory, place all three ad units. However you should pay attention to the payouts. Current assumption is you get 60% of the revenue (on a $0.05 click you get $0.03). So if a click from the third ad unit is only paying between 3 to 5 cents you may want to omit it from your page. This is one are where giving your ad units channels does have value. If one ad unit is getting a higher percentage of click throughs you’ll want to make sure the highest paying ads are being served there. TIP:Use CSS positioning to get your highest paying ads serving in the location with the highest CTR.

Adsense in RSS

With the growth of blogs and RSS feeds you’re starting to see adsense included in the feeds now. IMHO this doesn’t work, and here’s why:

  • You only get to place one ad unit.
  • You have no control over finding the ’sweet spot’ for the ad unit.
  • The ads are usually poorly targeted (this is getting better).
  • People develop ‘banner blindness’.

I know people like being able to read full postings in their feed reader, and there are at least a dozen other reasons for full posts from pleasing your users to mobile offline computing, all of which are completely valid. However if your website depends on generating adsense revenue to survive, then bring them to the site and show them the ads there.

Affiliate Sites

Placing Adsense on affiliate sites is tricky. Are you giving up a $10, $20, or $30 sale for a $1 click? This is something you have to test on your own to figure out. If you aren’t converting now it’s definitely worth a try. I like to use adsense on my article pages. For example let’s say you had an affiliate website where you sold shoes. You’re going to need some related articles to ‘flesh out’ the site. Things like ‘getting a shoe shine’ or ‘finding a shoe repair shop’ these are excellent spots for adsense. While you won’t get rich, they will usually provide a small steady income and cover things like hosting costs.TIP: If you find you have pages getting more than 50 clicks per month add more pages about this topic, and link the pages together. Mine you logs for the search terms used.

PPC Arbitrage

This is a dicey subject so I’m going to steer clear of precise examples. Basically you bid on low volume uber niche terms at a very low cost. You set up landing page that contains high payout ads for the related general topic. You are looking for terms with a large gap between the price you are bidding on adwords and the price you are getting on Adsense. If you pay $0.10 a click and get $1.00 a click you make $0.90 each click. To get your adsense ad approved you will need to ‘add some value’ along the way. You can make a killing or get taken to the cleaners with this one, so make sure you know what you are doing before you try it.

Have any other adsense tips, tricks or secrets? Drop me an email and let me know, I’ll give you credit.

Added
728 leaderboard works very well if it is just above the end of the
“above the fold” area on what would be considered your viewers average
resolution/browser window size if there are few other enticing links
above the fold. Makes for an interesting layout but if you’re building
a site for AdSense it may be worth it. We consistently receive very
high CTRs from doing this.

Try to build sites that allow you to quickly try any and all of
those locations outlined in the heatmap guide or at least allow you a
wide degree of freedom to easily change ad/content locations.